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Inspired by an audio book (“Endlich mehr verdienen” by “Bodo Schäfer”) I set up two journals and started to record my daily successes and the fun events to get to know myself even better:

Success Journal: I record all events that I realized as a success. In addition, I added the skills (trained) and the talents (born) that made these successes possible.

Fun Journal: I record all events where I experienced a relevant fun factor or where I reached a relevant level of flow that made me to forget everything else while doing these activities.

After maintaining the journals for a period of four to six weeks, I started to evaluate the records and identified the skills and talents that helped me to achieve the successes as well as the activities that were a fun experience to me. The results of this evaluation – for example – helped me to focus my energy onto the right targets and to sharpen my resume.

Today, I still force myself to record my successes and my fun events into these journals on a daily basis and even if the findings are repetitive, it helps me to motivate myself.

Another interesting way to identify my skills, talents, strengths and weaknesses was to write down all key events of my life. – Just a short list of the 10 to 15 most relevant events that formed my way to where I am today.

Beside these findings on a very high level, I started to record all activities of my workday to evaluate how I spend my time in more detail. Starting a simple paper-based list in the morning and recording all activities or projects in its timeline would have been sufficient, but I decided to use software for this. I chose the tool TimePanic (www.timepanic.com) which makes it quite easy to capture and evaluate the spent time. A beneficial side effect of the time recording is, that I am only able to book my time to one project at the time and this forces me to do single-tasking only. That helps me to focus on the current activity without multi-tasking between several tasks as I did in the past.